Finally got around to installing Enlightenment DR17 a couple of days back. I have to say that screenshots really don’t do it justice. You see it in action to appreciate the little bits of eye candy that happens as you move about the desktop. Windows have drop shadows generated by enlightenment itself without intervention from the X server.
It’s not all looks though as windows open very fast, on par with any of the *box series of window managers by my estimates. I haven’t really delved into configuration yet as I want to play around with it before I break it. Everything is kept in .e as opposed to .enlightenment so both DR16 and 17 can be run on the same machine.
I won’t bother with screenshots as there’s not much to see theme wise at the moment but have a look at get-e.org for documentation and a few themes if you’re interested.
I’ve also restarted my GTK2 theming experiments, attempting to apply styles to individual widgets instead of the ubiqutous “*”. The problem with using a catch-all is that everything gets the style applied to it (kind of obvious really but I said it anyway), including buttons and input boxes on web pages and as I want a dark theme this clashes with the lighter colours of a lot of websites. Trying to find which GTK widgets apply the colour styles to these elements has proves a bit of a pain so far.
To think, I do this sort of thing for fun.
Doctor Who came to an end last weekend and has left a little hole in my TV viewing.
I was worried that it might feel quite dated but the whole look was brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It’s a pity that Christopher Eccleston decided to leave after only one series as I felt he played the Doctor really well. We’ll just have to see what David Tennant brings to the part.
We’ve been watching Glastonbury excerpts on TV over the weekend. Kim was waiting for the Magic Numbers but they didn’t play due to the singer losing his voice. Not the best thing to happen to a singer but there you go. I wasn’t sure about Bloc Party. They’re the sort of band I should like but the set didn’t really move me until 2 songs from the end. Worth picking up a cd though.
Off to watch Primal Scream.
Update: Kim tells me the Magic Numbers did play in the end. They just didn’t make it on TV.
I can’t say I’ve ever really been impressed by Javascript. Oh sure, on the surface you can do lots of interesting things with it but browser support has always been varied (only works with IE or Netscape for instance) and then there was always the issue of those that surfed with Javascript turned off. Me for instance.
But I noticed recently Jeremy Keith posting about a get together which started me thinking. If these people who are aware and use web standards are happy to use it then maybe things have moved on since I last looked at it although I’m not sure what relation Javascript has to the Document Object Model (DOM).
It would appear that things have move on since I last flirted with the webs evil twin*.
An article on Digital Web would appear to be a good place to start figuring out uses for the DOM. Especially as I enjoy creating forms. No, really. Honest.
*It’s a joke dammit. I’ve never been one of those who thought Javascript evil. Just not convinced of it’s useability.
The Mac Mini turned out to be what we were looking for in a Mac. Cheap. Kim had mentioned a few times about getting a Mac (especially after I bought her an iPod) but my current obsession with a certain Windows only based game had put me off. Oddly enough when we first discussed getting a PC a few years ago I wanted a Mac but Kim had far more knowledge of PC’s and, well, it was her money we were spending so we went the PC route.
For a while we could have switched as Quake3 (and some others I played) was also available on Mac as well as PC but unfortunately it became too late when I discovered Eve. It’s sad when the things you want to do are dictated by a game but there you go. Who said I was perfect?
I’ve needed to upgrade the PC for a while now so was looking at that when they launched the Mac Mini which seemed to be ideal. We could use the Mac as the main work machine for both of us and I could setup a Shuttle PC as a games machine. Sounds good doesn’t it?
Until Apple announced the processor switch that is. Macs tend to hold their second hand value though and it’s still going to be useable due to the emulation software Apple will be using (whose name escapes me at this moment in time) so it may not be an issue.
In my opinion the key with any hardware upgrade is to think in terms of the current market and just buy when you need it. If you look ahead you’ll always be waiting a few more months for something better.
If you continue repeating things often enough you’re bound to be correct at some point. A friend pointed me to news report on news.com stating that Apple would be switching to Intel processors and the mac community breathed a collective sigh of “here we go again”.
The weird thing was that this time it was true. An awful lot of people, like myself, who’ve used Macs for a number of years simply dismissed it as another rumour to add to the pile of ones already discarded.
Apple have always been hardware manufacturers. Mac OS was simply the interface and the fact that people liked it was the carrot to make them buy the hardware. If they released Mac OS as a standalone OS running on x86 architecture then who would honestly pay the premium that Apple charge for it’s hardware?
The question for me is how are Apple going to stop people from buying a copy of Tiger and installing it on their home built x86 rig?
I had thought that maybe Apple hardware would carry a security chip that the OS has to detect before it can be installed on that machine but then realised it won’t take 5 minuites for someone to code a crack for it. Well maybe a bit longer but you see what I mean surely.
Are they going to stop them or are we seeing a new direction from Apple? Let the rumours begin.
If a week is a long time in OS X then it’s been at least half a lifetime since I last said something.
So what have we been doing all this time?
I finally decided to take all the web code/design skills I have and start putting them to good use. It’s obviously taking a while to get things moving so I’m juggling a day job with what I want to do, which is what most people do I guess when starting out. Getting a business website for myself is something that keeps slipping down my “todo” list. This place could also do with a revamp as well.
Eve still continues to take up a lot of my free time with the side effect that, as it doesn’t work under Linux (yet) I spend all my time working in Windows. I can’t remember the last time I booted into Slackware. Eve does have some support under WINE/cedega but not enough to make it playable and I’m too lazy to keep booting back and forth.
As far as the OS X work related problems I was talking about back in November are concerned they never really went away. We just got used to them and created workarounds or simply said “we can’t do that anymore”. I wonder if that happens to other companies when a big change over occurs.
Well that’s all I’ve really been up too since November. I think I’ll post some thoughts on specifics under seperate posts. It’ll look like I’ve more to say than I actually have.
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